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Re: Novice question: selecting an element based on an attribute id
- From: Jeni Tennison <jeni at jenitennison dot com>
- To: ohmson at netscape dot net ((ohmson ampere))
- Cc: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
- Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:56:51 +0000
- Subject: Re: [xsl] Novice question: selecting an element based on an attribute id
- Organization: Jeni Tennison Consulting Ltd
- References: <1A872317.6E0C04B5.00068BF0@netscape.net>
- Reply-to: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
Hi Ohmson,
> As you can see, based on "myIdRef", I am supposed to retrieve the
> original string. In this example, the referent and the reference are
> close but sometimes in a big document, they could be far apart. I
> bet I can do this inefficiently by keeping state of all the
> referents in XSL variables but you folks probably have an better
> idea on how to do this efficiently.
Use a key. You can set up a key so that all the elements that have a
myId attribute are indexed by their myId attribute:
<xsl:key name="values" match="*[@myId]" use="@myId" />
And then retrieve an element with a particular value for its myId
attribute using the key() function. For example, to get the element
whose myId attribute is 28, you can use:
key('values', 28)
If the current node has a myIdRef attribute, then you can use that to
provide the second argument to the call for the key:
key('values', @myIdRef)
The call to the key() function actually returns the node; you can
apply templates to it, for example, to process it:
<xsl:apply-templates select="key('values', @myIdRef)" />
Cheers,
Jeni
---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/
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